在《蜘蛛侠3》和《加勒比海盗》不断的创造票房神话的同时，恐怖惊悚片的票房就很不如人意了，以至于现在让片商们感到恐怖的已经不是剧情，而是票房了。

LOS ANGELES, June 10 — Moviegoers put a nail in the coffin¹ of a dying horror boom this weekend, as "Hostel²: Part II" opened to just $8.8 million in ticket sales, far behind the crime caper³ "Ocean’s Thirteen" in a three-day period of relatively⁴ soft box office performance.

Rico Torres/Lionsgate An understandably distressed5 Heather Matarazzo in "Hostel: Part II."

"Ocean’s Thirteen," with a cast of stars led by George Clooney and Brad Pitt, ranked first with $37.1 million, slightly underperforming its predecessor6, "Ocean's Twelve." That film took in about $39.2 million when Warner Brothers released it in December 2004 and went on to collect more than $125.5 million in domestic ticket sales. Meanwhile "Hostel: Part II," a torture-theme thriller7 from the director Eli Roth, placed No. 6 for the weekend and did less than half the opening business of the original "Hostel." That movie made about $19.6 million in its first weekend when Lionsgate released it in January of last year and helped feed a wave of horror releases that have often come up short.

In the last few months the Weinstein Company's "Grindhouse" failed its own hype as a hip⁸ event, Fox Atomic's higher-browed zombie film "28 Weeks Later" undershot its predecessor, and a long string of less ambitious horror pictures sputtered⁹ as the audience for bigger, family-friendly pictures like "Spider-Man 3," "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" and "Shrek the Third" led a broad surge in ticket sales.

Lionsgate, although it releases films in a variety of genres¹¹, had done especially well with relatively low-budget horror in the recent past. Its "Saw III," for instance, took in about $165 million at the worldwide box office last year, while the original "Hostel" had about $81 million in ticket sales around the world.

"It's kind of like that Mark Twain quote, ‘Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,'" said Michael Burns, vice¹² chairman of Lionsgate. "Everything takes a breather."

Mr. Burns attributed the weakening performance of horror to a marketplace glut¹³ rather than to any growing revulsion to the genre¹⁰'s excesses or a backlash against violence in the wake of the Virginia Tech killings¹⁴, as some have suggested. He said his studio, which is co-releasing "Captivity¹⁵" with After Dark Films in July and has a fourth "Saw" scheduled for October, had already de-emphasized its reliance on the genre because of too much competition.

Total business for the weekend's Top 12 films was down 9.1 percent from the comparable weekend last year, when Disney's "Cars" opened, according to the box-office reporting firm Media by Numbers. Disney's "Pirates" fell 52 percent to finish second with $21.3 million for the weekend and a total of $253.6 million; Universal's "Knocked Up" was third with $20 million, down 35 percent, and a total of $66.2 million; "Surf's Up," a new release from Sony Pictures, was fourth with $18 million; and "Shrek the Third," from DreamWorks and Paramount¹⁶, was fifth with $15.8 million, for a total of $281.9 million.

"We did our share," said Dan Fellman, Warner Brothers' president for theatrical¹⁷ distribution, noting that the year-to-date box office remains¹⁸ "very strong." Revenue, thanks in part to higher ticket prices, is up about 5 percent — a significant amount — to almost $4 billion so far. Attendance meanwhile is up about 1 percent.